After the end of apartheid back in the early nineties, the political leaders of SA society sat down to negotiate a settlement of their differences and a framework for running the country with efficiency, economy and effectiveness in the twenty-first century. This aim remains a work in progress, stunted by ideological dogma, misplaced idealism and an outmoded worldview.
The different parties negotiating what was called “The National Accord” spent years in the process of reaching the long-awaited accord. More than two million citizens of SA participated directly in the Constitution-building process that led, eventually, to the certification of the current Constitution by the new Constitutional Court in 1996. The certification process was required to ensure that basic principles agreed upon actually found their way into the final compromise, which enjoyed widespread political support. These principles may be summarised; they are drawn from Chapter One and Schedule 4 of the Constitution itself:
Our 1996 Constitution is founded on a set of core founding provisions, constitutional values, and structural principles that are set out in Chapter 1 and Schedule 4 of the Constitution. To summarise:
Founding Values (Chapter 1, Section 1)
South Africa is a sovereign, democratic state founded on these non-negotiable values:
- Human dignity: The advancement of human rights and the respect for the worth of every individual.
- Equality: The achievement of equality and the full and equal enjoyment of all rights and freedoms.
- Non-racialism and non-sexism: The rejection of racial, gender, and all other forms of systemic discrimination.
- Constitutional supremacy: The principle that the Constitution is the supreme law of the land; no law or government action can override it.
- The Rule of law is also regarded as supreme: The governance of the country through legally binding rules, an independent judiciary, and predictable legal processes.
- Democratic governance: Universal adult suffrage, a national common voters’ roll, regular elections, and a multi-party system of democratic government to ensure accountability, responsiveness, and openness.
Key Structural & Constitutional Principles (Schedule 4)
When the final Constitution was drafted under the 1993 Interim Constitution, it had to comply with 34 certified Constitutional Principles, which include:
- One sovereign state: A single, shared South African citizenship and a unitary democratic system of government.
- Justiciable Bill of Rights: Universal fundamental rights, freedoms, and civil liberties protected by entrenched provisions that can be enforced through the courts.
- Separation of powers & checks and balances on the exercise of power: Division of authority across the legislature, executive, and an independent judiciary to prevent the abuse of power. The checks and balances also include our six Chapter Nine Institutions which were formulated to bed down constitutional democracy in the hearts and minds of the liberated population of SA. They are sometimes regarded as a fourth branch of government in addition to the legislature, executive and judiciary. All Chapter Nine Institutions have been instrumental in grass-roots change in the hearts and minds of the citizenry: from being passive subjects of an authoritarian regime to the development of active and participative citizenship in a constitutional democratic order under the rule of law. Unlike the situation in a parliamentary democracy, politicians cannot do as they please because they need to paint within the lines drawn in the Constitution itself. This feature entails that any conduct or new law that is inconsistent with the Constitution is invalid and may be struck down by the courts at the instance of an aggrieved public- interest litigant.
- Co-operative government: National, provincial, and local spheres of government that are distinct yet interdependent, operating in mutual trust and good faith.
- Public administration values (Section 195): Administration that is ethical, transparent, accountable, efficient, and development-oriented. It is a requirement of the Constitution that the use of resources also be promoted to be economic and effective. Good human-resource management and career-development practices to maximise human potential must be cultivated.
It needs to be borne in mind that the Constitution is the product of a hard-fought negotiation process that took place over several years and involved the vast majority of politically active players in the old SA and the then homelands. who all combined to form the new SA. Liberation movements and all the elements of the old regime sat down to thrash out the compromise eventually reached.
It is sometimes said, somewhat wryly, that a good compromise is one in which all parties are equally (dis-)satisfied with its terms. The parties to the compromise that became the Constitution approached the negotiations with vastly different agendas. The liberation movements, some relying on the 1955 Freedom Charter, insisted on a unitary state. Some elements of federalism, favoured by the National Party and the IFP, are to be found in the eventual compromise, but the opening words of Section 1 of the Constitution confirm that SA is “one, sovereign, democratic state…”
This notion involved re-incorporating the independent and other homelands of the old SA in the new dispensation. Our form of democracy is multi-party democracy under the rule of law. We are not a one-party state nor even a dominant party state. All claims to dominance fell away in 2024 when voters decided that no single party would amass more than 40% of the votes cast in the general elections held in May of that year. We now have a coalition government of ten parties which calls itself, somewhat inaccurately, the Government of National Unity or GNU.
Those who dominated politics for the first thirty years of freedom, until they were toppled in the 2024 national elections, brought to the pre-liberation negotiating table (or at least had in mind) the notion of a National Democratic Revolution (NDR). The tripartite alliance between the ANC, SACP and COSATU, which governed under the Constitution until 2024 at national level, did not insist that the NDR be a part of the constitutional dispensation. Its tenets were instead incorporated in the “Strategy and Tactics” of the ANC. They have been studied by Dr Anthea Jeffery in her magisterial analysis published as “Countdown to Socialism”.
The basic aim of the NDR is to secure hegemonic control of all the levers of power in SA. Former President Thabo Mbeki has recently sought to distance the ANC from the widely-accepted socialistic goals of the NDR. The ANC persists with its NDR agenda, despite the formation of the GNU with parties that do not embrace its tenets.
At the core of the NDR is the aim of extending party control. This aim is expressed in the ANC (1998) document “The State, Property Relations and Social Transformation.” It states:
“… Transformation of the state entails, first and foremost, extending the power of the National Liberation Movement over all levers of power: the army, the police, the bureaucracy, intelligence structures, the judiciary, parastatals and agencies such as regulatory bodies, the public broadcaster, the central bank and so on.”
This statement is pure NDR theory, coming from the horse’s mouth.
As Professor Nicola de Jager of Stellenbosch University has observed, the ANC looks to political power to transform South African society. Strong state intervention is seen in the form of Black Economic Empowerment strategies, affirmative action initiatives and a general pressure to conform from the state apparatus on businesses and society at large.
Since the ANC considers the current status quo as illegitimate and the heritage of eighty years of white rule, it justifies the necessity of greater state intervention to address these past injustices. Some in the ANC regard the Constitution as no more than a beachhead in the ongoing NDR struggle.
In fact, the Constitution is the solemnly adopted outcome of a lengthy negotiation process.
Former President Thabo Mbeki described the National Democratic Revolution (NDR) in 2026 as organised around two core elements: national liberation and democratic change.
Speaking at the NDR Seminar hosted by the Thabo Mbeki Foundation and the African Renaissance Podcast in Johannesburg in July 2026, Mbeki outlined these aims as follows:
- National Liberation: This involves freeing the oppressed from settler-colonial and apartheid domination. Mbeki emphasized that liberation cannot stop simply at political rights or the right to vote; it must extend to tangible economic consequences and economic liberation to dismantle structured inequality.
- Democratic Change: This entails establishing and maintaining a democratic system of governance in a liberated South Africa, building on the democratic institutions, the 1996 Constitution, and legislative oversight established post-1994.
- Rejecting the Socialism Stepping-Stone Myth: Mbeki rejected the characterization of the NDR as a Leninist roadmap or a secret first stage designed to transition South Africa into socialism. He maintained, somewhat controversially, that the NDR is strictly defined by national and democratic transformation rather than a hidden socialist agenda.
- Economic Transformation Gaps: He and other participants noted that while political rights were achieved, deep economic transformation—particularly ownership and control within the financial and corporate sectors (such as low black ownership on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange)—remains an unfinished task.
Whether Mbeki’s views are shared by his initial successor as leader of the tripartite alliance, Jacob Zuma, or by any more recent ANC leadership, is open to question. The Mbeki-sponsored notion of a counter-revolution fomented in 2007 seems somewhat fanciful.
The worldview of Jacob Zuma, now leader of the MKP, is certainly not one that embraces constitutional democracy under the rule of law. Zuma’s attitude, as experienced by his predecessor as president, is recorded by Mark Gevisser in his biography of Thabo Mbeki, “The Dream Deferred” 2007, (published before Zuma’s election to lead the ANC at its December 2007 Polokwane conference) thus:
“Zuma and his backers had no respect for the rule of law, and would be unaccountable to the constitutional dispensation the ANC had put in place if they came to power. There was also the worry of a resurgence of ethnic politics, and – given his support from the left – that Zuma’s leftist advisors would undo all the meticulous stitching of SA into the global economy that Mbeki and his economic managers had undertaken over 15 years.”
It is no coincidence that the MKP favours a reversion to parliamentary rule in SA, in place of the supremacy of the Constitution that has been in place, by agreement, since day one of the “new SA”. Zuma apparently does not enjoy being corrected by judges. The processes of “radical economic transformation” and the debilitating phenomenon of state capture characterise the Zuma years, which ended with his resignation as president on 14 February 2018. He insists that he will remain a member of the ANC for life, despite his expulsion from it.
The pursuit of the tenets of the NDR has been described by some academics as part of the “theatre” of the ANC. President Ramaphosa and some of the ANC members of the current GNU cabinet do endorse the NDR in the vaguest of terms. Whether Ramaphosa has the focus punted by Mbeki in his 2026 speech is by no means clear.
The resolutions taken by the ANC at its 55th national conference held at the end of 2022 and the beginning of 2023 end with this final flourish:
The delegates to the 55th National Conference are at one: South Africa and the ANC are at a moment of fundamental consequence. This moment requires clarity of thought, firm conviction and courage, decisiveness as well as an unshaken commitment to the ideals that have inspired generations of South Africa’s freedom fighters who sacrificed and suffered so that our country can be free, and our people can live as equals, with their human dignity fully restored. We shall not allow the gains of our democracy to be eroded and reversed. We shall not allow the radical socio-economic transformation of our country to be aborted. Nor shall we allow the fundamental renewal of the ANC to be stopped or sabotaged.
The democratic renewal of our country and the fundamental transformation of our society and economy is a strategic goal from which the ANC will not retreat. As our country undergoes significant macro-social changes and the world experiences multiple disruptive transitions, the ANC and the progressive forces need to re-invigorate a vision of what it means to be progressive in the 21st century – with respect to strategy and tactics, policy, and methods of organisation – placing the well-being of all of humanity and the planet at the centre of our political life.
There was a public debate in 2014 between Zuma’s deputy, Cyril Ramaphosa and FW de Klerk, the last apartheid-era president. It concerned the attachment of the ANC to the tenets of the NDR.
The public debate between Cyril Ramaphosa and FW de Klerk over the ANC’s National Democratic Revolution (NDR) took place in the columns of Politicsweb.
Key Details of the Spat
- The Trigger: In January 2014, then-Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa responded to critiques regarding transformation, leading former President FW de Klerk to issue a public reply on 31 January 2014 questioning the compatibility of the NDR with South Africa’s constitutional order. The term “revolution” does not appear in the Constitution and De Klerk maintained that he and his followers had not signed up for it when the Constitution was negotiated.
- De Klerk’s Position: FW de Klerk argued that the NDR’s ideological framework conflicted with the foundational principles and core values of the 1996 Constitution, expressing concern that the ANC viewed the Constitution merely as a temporary stepping-stone rather than a permanent compact.
- Ramaphosa’s Position: Ramaphosa defended the ANC’s transformation agenda and the NDR, maintaining that its goal was the achievement of genuine political and economic freedom for black South Africans and redress for the injustices of apartheid within a constitutional framework. This is hardly a revolutionary agenda.
For more details on the arguments exchanged during this period, read The NDR: FW de Klerk’s reply to Cyril Ramaphosa and The Constitution vs the NDR – IFAISA – Politicsweb.
A victorious revolution should usually precede any counter-revolution. However, there has been no revolution in SA. It is true that some communistically inclined theorists in the ANC used the notion of a national democratic revolution during and beyond the struggle years.
Who can forget then ANC Youth President, Julius Malema, angrily throwing Jonah Fisher of the BBC out of Luthuli House – to Malema it was the home of the revolution.
The notions which inform the NDR should have been overtaken by the negotiation of a national accord more than 30 years ago. That process brought the liberation struggle to an end. Protracted peaceful negotiations led to the replacement of the parliamentary sovereignty of the apartheid era with the acclaimed constitutional democracy of the new dispensation.
Sleight of hand was involved on the part of those who solemnly signed the Constitution while continuing to pursue the agenda of the NDR.
There was, in point of fact, no revolutionary overthrow, no victory march on the Union Buildings, no vanquished foes; just a peacefully negotiated and binding settlement followed by a joyous “free at last” celebration at Johannesburg’s Carlton Hotel. Mbeki was there. His recent notion that a counter-revolution was started in 2007 has been kept out of the public eye until July 2026.
All duly elected politicians in SA affirm or swear fealty to the Constitution. A transformed, but not revolutionary, new dispensation for all in SA is what the Constitution, our supreme law, requires. It makes no reference to any revolution and eschews the notion of “hegemonic control of all levers of power in society” which revolutionaries seek, preferring the rule of law and the doctrine of the separation of powers. Revolutionary conduct is both inconsistent with the Constitution and invalid under its Section 2. Real revolutionaries do not participate in regular free and fair multi-party elections. They foment their revolutions.
State capture in and after the Zuma years is not a counter-revolution, it is a form of the crime called corruption and, like any other political crime, should be punished both in the courts and at the polls. The long overdue exacting of legal and political accountability achieves this felicitous outcome.
The crippling of SA’s criminal justice administration (via the notion of hegemonic control of all the levers of power) has seen grand corruption and organised crime flourish. Since 2005, Zuma has faced and has delayed charges of corruption arising out of his allegedly corrupt relationship with his financial adviser, Schabir Shaik. The trial is scheduled to start in 2027. Whether it does remains to be seen.
The late Prof Kader Asmal, a member of Mbeki’s cabinet, on whose kitchen table in Dublin, where he lived in exile, a draft of the Bill of Rights was prepared, called on the ANC to abandon the National Democratic Revolution after the new constitutional order dawned.
Instead of listening to him, ANC politicians have descended into organised criminal syndicates that alternately pay lip service to the rule of law or contrary lip service to the National Democratic Revolution, all the while looting SA’s coffers and assets. Their crimes are slowly undermining and will, left unchecked, eventually destroy all prospects of peace, progress and prosperity for all in SA.
State capture during and after the Zuma years is not a counter-revolution. It is a form of the crime called corruption and, like any other political crime, should be punished both in the courts and at the polls. The long overdue exacting of legal and political accountability achieves this felicitous outcome, but it is not one that the ANC relishes.
Professor Bonang Mohale, Chancellor of the University of the Free State, has made a sober assessment of the progress of the ANC since the liberation of SA. He says:
“The great problem for SA is rampant greed. It is essentially a problem for the once-glorious ANC that has morphed into an organised crime syndicate.”
This greed is in evidence wherever one looks: not only from the evidence presented during the hearings of various commissions of inquiry. The ANC has turned the public administration and state-owned enterprises away from the values and principles itemised in Section 195 of the Constitution, giving rise instead to cadre deployment of unsuitable but politically well-connected cadres, tenderpreneurism and patronage networks such as those which were operated in prisons by Bosasa and by the Big Five at Tembisa Hospital.
Covidpreneurism (crooked tenders during the Covid pandemic) must rank as the most morally bankrupt form of the kind of corruption that has spawned the term “tenderpreneurism.”
Ramaphosa himself testified before Chief Justice Zondo about the role of the national cadre deployment committee of the ANC (which he chaired between 2012 and 2018) in the appointment of judges, including justices of the Constitutional Court, our apex court.
The ravages of cadre deployment, the posting of unsuitable but loyal supporters of the NDR to all manner of roles for which they are all too often neither qualified nor fitted, has done untold harm to the fabric of society in SA. The spread of water-borne diseases in Bronkhorstspruit, due to an abject failure to disinfect drinking water for weeks on end, is a recent egregious example of the failure of cadres of the NDR to do the basics.
The current leadership of the ANC needs to take a close look at what really matters to it. If Professor Mohale is correct that it has morphed into an organised crime syndicate, the political will to address the corrosive effects of corruption on the body politic will be difficult to generate. The talk of renewal in the ANC surely involves the abandonment by it of the pernicious aspects of the NDR and the dismantling of its patronage networks. Unsuitably deployed cadres of the NDR will have to be removed, retired or shifted to posts they can fill properly.
The criminal justice administration will have to be renovated radically by putting effective and efficient anti-corruption machinery in place, so that those who have been painting outside the lines for ever so long can be brought to book. This would be by raking back their loot and by bringing them to trial in the criminal courts of the land. By all accounts, the loot runs into trillions of rand.
The bills sponsored by the DA Chief Whip, Glynnis Breytenbach, which envisage a new Chapter Nine Anti-Corruption body, address these issues in a constitutionally compliant way.
If the politicians don’t act now, the voters will do so in the general elections due in 2029.
[Image: by 89STOCKER]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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